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Question:

  • Is it possible to start a grammatically-correct English sentence with the word "Than"?
  • If no, what other English words share this property?

Background:

  • Trevor claimed that it is impossible. This is an attempt to verify or repudiate Trevor's claim.
JEL
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dreftymac
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    Nice little puzzle. +1. My instinct is Trevor is right, outside of cheating: " 'Than' is the word that begins this sentence." – Dan Bron Dec 01 '14 at 22:39
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    I suppose one could say: 'Than John, Nick is clearly taller; but the latter is otherwise the shortest in the class'. – WS2 Dec 01 '14 at 22:47
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    @yellowantphil That should be posted as a separate question altogether. – DBedrenko Dec 02 '14 at 08:51
  • Re the second question, “ago” seems impossible to start a sentence with (that is, a simple declarative sentence). Credit: I found that in ShreevatsaR’s answer to a similar-but-not-quite-the same question. Intrestingly, ShreevatsaR suggests there that he believes there are other such words… but “ago” is the only example he or anyone else gives that doesn’t get immediately refuted. – PLL Dec 02 '14 at 10:14
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    @WS2 Approves of your sentence, Yoda does! – Digital Chris Dec 02 '14 at 13:53
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    Re: background, who is Trevor? – Kyle Strand Dec 02 '14 at 18:31
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    ... and why are Trevor's challenges being asked here? – GEdgar Dec 02 '14 at 19:17
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    Trevor wouldn't deign to challenge us directly. That's far too plebeian for Him. – Justin Greer Dec 02 '14 at 19:43
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    @PLL et al., I don't see why ago (or yore) can't be used without a preceding noun or adjective other than that current usage 'dictates'. (OED says ago was first a past participle (Cf 'agone')). I'm sure the word is just waiting for the chance. Ago some years he El Dorado found. or Ago in January you got the phone call. – pazzo Dec 02 '14 at 20:02
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    'Than' is rarely an acceptable way to begin a sentence. (Similar to @DanBron) – kingsfoil Dec 02 '14 at 20:40
  • It is certainly possible, but it is not recommended. It is very unnatural. – Mitch Dec 02 '14 at 22:52
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    @PLL That’s because ago must be used postpositively, whether you want to call it postposition or an adsomething that’s mandatorily postpositioned after its argument. No matter what you call them, nothing that always needs something to come before it can start a sentence. – tchrist Dec 02 '14 at 23:45
  • @tchrist prescriptive much? – pazzo Dec 03 '14 at 03:38
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    @KyleStrand: others also wonder who's this guy, Trevor. this may shed some light: http://youtu.be/_N-HhIYmHeo Or not. – dnagirl Dec 03 '14 at 05:47
  • @dnagirl LOVE IT!!! :D You solved the mystery!! :D – dreftymac Dec 03 '14 at 13:10
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    @tchrist But I rather like the idea of Ago in September..., not that I have heard it used that way. But that should certainly not stand as an impediment, in an age when people take the most ghastly liberties with the language. – WS2 Dec 03 '14 at 13:23
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    @tchrist: I agree, but what seems surprising is that it’s difficult to find any other word in English with such strong postposition restrictions. – PLL Dec 03 '14 at 14:43
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    @δοῦλος Can you find any examples of sentences beginning with ago from published books - apart from citation forms? – Araucaria - Him Jan 20 '15 at 20:17
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    @WS2 Yes, but me able remembrance of happily times. Also is this grammatically because it tickle the boat of a persons? – Araucaria - Him Jan 20 '15 at 20:19
  • @Araucaria I'm uninterested in that activity and whether it might return anything. – pazzo Jan 20 '15 at 23:21
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    The example on your profile (***Ago December it snowed forty four inches in Buffalo.*) is ungrammatical in the extreme. This has nothing to do with prescriptivism. –  May 05 '15 at 02:28

7 Answers7

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Playing off WS2's comments, there's this excerpt from Cakes and Ale: or, the Skeleton in the Cupboard, a 1930 novel by W. Somerset Maugham:

"Than Roy no one could show a more genuine cordiality to a fellow novelist whose name was on everybody’s lips, but no one could more genially turn a cold shoulder on him when idleness, failure or someone else’s success had cast a shade on his notoriety." (Source)

This is, at least to me, a stylistic choice to invert the natural order of the sentence. It actually flows quite well to my ears, and though I've never used the construction myself, it sounds quite natural.

So, based on this one example alone (and the others that can be formed from its example), I would hazard that the answer to your question is yes and that Trevor, by the answer's merits, is repudiated.

Justin Greer
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    That is a stretch, though. Than Maugham a construction that few people would use. – Hot Licks Dec 02 '14 at 00:01
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    @HotLicks So what? It meets the criterion, and is published literature no less. There are a lot of constructions few people would use; most people don’t avail themselves of most of what English has to offer. Again, I ask you: so what? – tchrist Dec 02 '14 at 02:17
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    If anyone other than Maugham had written it, the propriety of its syntax would be seriously questioned. – Hot Licks Dec 02 '14 at 02:32
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    "Than to have never tried, I say, it would be far better to have tried and failed." Well, it does sound a bit quaint and literary, but it's very much an example of modern English. +1 I would never have thought of this, but it is self-evident. – Panzercrisis Dec 02 '14 at 04:26
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    @HotLicks: I emphatically disagree. I consider it a perfectly acceptable (albeit highly marked) stylistic choice. (I’m also fairly sure that I have actually used the construction.) – Brian M. Scott Dec 02 '14 at 07:26
  • @HotLicks: I try to explain in my answer below why some examples of this approach work better than others. – PLL Dec 02 '14 at 10:05
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    @HotLicks I will quite happily question the syntax of something by Maugham, if its syntax left anything to question. – Jon Hanna Dec 02 '14 at 10:06
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    @HotLicks. "Than" only works in conjunction with an explicit or implicit comparative. That is why Maugham's example ("Than....more genuine") is correct, while yours ("Than....???") is wrong. – fdb Dec 02 '14 at 13:06
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    It sounds most unnatural to me; I had to read it three times before I could figure out what the hell he meant. While you can write things like this, or "most upset am I" and people can probably figure out what you mean, that does not make it grammatically correct. – psusi Dec 02 '14 at 15:33
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    @psusi You're right: Just because someone can figure something out doesn't make it grammatically correct. But someone finding something confusing doesn't make it grammatically incorrect, either. – Justin Greer Dec 02 '14 at 16:58
  • Well, if all else fails: "Than" is a word that is rarely used to start a sentence. – Hot Licks Dec 02 '14 at 19:48
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    It's not just Maugham, Shakespeare was at it as well - e.g. Cymbeline (IV, 4): "Than be so / better to cease to be."; Richard III (III, 4): "Than my Lord Hastings no man might be bolder". – psmears Dec 03 '14 at 10:36
  • @HotLicks I believe you may have meant, "Than Maugham a construction that few people would use other." – jaxter Dec 04 '16 at 18:14
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Bob's fat is so much more adorable than everybody else's, Mary said.

-Than everybody else's? You can't be serious.

'I'm very serious. Even more adorable than a- a- a-', halted Mary.

-'Than a what?'

'Than a blue whale on a trapeze.'

pazzo
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    Indeed; fragments are not grammatically correct sentences. – psusi Dec 02 '14 at 15:34
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    @psusi That depends entirely on your definition of what a sentence is, and unfortunately there is no consensus whatsoever (even among syntacticians and structural linguists) what exactly constitutes a sentence. A sentence fragment would be a valid sentence according to many definitions. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 02 '14 at 22:55
  • @JanusBahsJacquet, not according to every one of my English and Latin teachers in school. – psusi Dec 03 '14 at 04:46
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    @psusi: There’s a difference between the academic linguistic usage of sentence, and the everyday usage. The academic sense of sentence includes sentence fragments, questions, and so on. The everyday usage of sentence corresponds to what a linguist, speaking carefully, might describe as something like “a declarative sentence, with neither the main verb phrase nor its subject elided”. I would take the question to be asking about sentences in the more colloquial sense. – PLL Dec 03 '14 at 14:38
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Justin Greer has already given an excellent answer, but it’s worth looking at why some examples of this seem more marked/forced, while others (like W2’s comment on the question) seem rather more plausible.

The most obvious way to get than at the start of a full declarative sentence is to use a “PP-fronting” construction, i.e. putting the prepositional phrase “than …” at the start, where you would normally expect to find the subject of the sentence.

So the key is to notice when and why English uses PP-fronting. It gets used mainly for topicalisation: that is, taking a phrase which would not normally the main topic of the sentence, and making it the topic. (See: the topic–comment model; and a couple of papers on PP-fronting.)

A sentence that fronts a “than…” phrase, then, is going to sound more natural if there is a clear reason for the phrase to get topicalised. One very strong natural reason is if it’s being contrasted with a parallel phrase in another sentence, where the rest of the sentence stays the same.

Beethoven is perhaps a greater composer than Mozart. Than Bach, though, he is certainly not greater!

Another way to get than to the front is to have the subject of the sentence a noun phrase which, by ellipsis, begins with than:

Running faster than a cat is easy. Than a dog, though, is more difficult.

Here the subject is the noun phrase “[running faster] than a dog”. So this example does rely crucially on its context, with the previous sentence supplying the ellipsis. It’s still a fully grammatical simple declarative sentence, though!

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PLL
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  • Is than considered a prepositional phrase by everyone who analyzes English? Meanwhile, thanks for the links. Look forward to reading. – pazzo Dec 02 '14 at 12:56
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    Very solid analysis. The papers in particular look interesting, and I'm glad someone answered the "why" of it all. – Justin Greer Dec 02 '14 at 17:00
  • @CarSmack: I’m not sure, I’m afraid — I’m not a trained linguist, just an amateur, so while I have read around the subject a decent bit, my knowledge is fairly patchy. – PLL Dec 02 '14 at 17:56
  • Analysis sounds good, but the examples look like sentence fragments (even if they're not). – Mark Hurd Dec 02 '14 at 23:36
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    I'm not sure the Bach sentence is grammatical (it sounds marginal to me at best), but the dog sentence is a good example. –  May 05 '15 at 02:32
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"Than" is a word that is normally difficult to start a grammatically correct sentence with.

Also:

Than a bear, the cub is smaller.

SrJoven
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Than a more typical sentence structure is this example certainly stranger. However, it is not invalid.

With other conjunctions and prepositions may we make the same construction.

From this point forward shall my answer be deemed complete.

Lightness Races in Orbit
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    Inversion as a result of PP fronting is not usual. In all three examples you give here, it is most unusual, or outright ungrammatical if you ask me. Just like it would have been for me to phrase my previous sentence, “In all three examples you give here is it most unusual”. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 02 '14 at 22:58
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: It sounds perfectly usual to my ears. You don't think "In the corner lies a pile of clothes" or "From over the hills came a peculiar sound" are grammatical or usual? What about the well-known rhyme that begins "first comes love, then comes marriage..." – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 03 '14 at 01:10
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    How about “At the moment have we no available openings, unfortunately” as a reply to someone looking for a job? Or “After lunch think I I’ll go for a walk”? Those (as well as all the others) would have been mandatory in more or less any other Germanic language than English (including older stages of English), but in Modern English, they are utterly ungrammatical to me. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 03 '14 at 01:14
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: Well I guess we'll just have to disagree on that point. I probably wouldn't use it in street speech... but, in writing? Absolutely. – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 03 '14 at 01:15
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    @Janus: I agree that the than example in the answer sounds ungrammatical. But your examples in comments sound not just correct but completely unremarkable to me, for either writing or speech. (32, BrE, in case that's a factor.) – PLL Dec 03 '14 at 17:29
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    @PLL Including “After lunch think I I'll go for a walk”? Even if inversion were the rule there, that ought still to be at least highly archaic, since inversion normally operates on auxiliaries only in Modern English. Would “Makes this dress me look fat?” be an unremarkable question to you, too? Or (to Lightness) how about “Than my sister makes this dress me look fatter?”? – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 03 '14 at 17:49
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    @JanusBahsJacquet: I agree that “Makes this dress…” is absolutely ungrammatical, and that “Than my sister…” is at best highly marked. But fronting a temporal phrase like “After lunch…” is I think quite standard; a Google books search gives plenty of examples in published, edited writing. – PLL Dec 03 '14 at 17:58
  • @PLL It's not the fronting—that's perfectly normal. It's the inversion that's not normal in Modern English. In your search link, you've left out the inversion. “After lunch, I think we'll go for a walk” is unremarkable; what I find bizarre is that Lightness is claiming that the inverted version, “After lunch think I we'll go for a walk” is also acceptable. To me, that is completely ungrammatical as well, and I have never come across it in anything written in the past two to three centuries. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 03 '14 at 19:25
  • Oh! I’m sorry; you’re absolutely right. I’d misread your examples, missing the inversions and only noticing the frontings. Yes, I agree they’re completely ungrammatical. – PLL Dec 03 '14 at 19:32
  • I’m tempted to delete this whole discussion now, to remove noise. Let me know whether you agree, and then I’ll either delete all my comments on this answer, or else just this comment :-) – PLL Dec 03 '14 at 19:34
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: Well, I don't dispute that there are certain examples where it really doesn't fit. I'm not sufficiently well-versed to academically define the differences unfortunately. Certainly I never claimed that "After lunch think I we'll go for a walk" is "acceptable" — it has more problems than just the inversion, anyway. But you've still not addressed my examples: "From over the hills came a peculiar sound" is pretty typical, as far as I've ever been aware. Do you disagree with this particular example? – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 03 '14 at 19:43
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    Sorry, I hadn't seen those at all (were they added in as an edit? Or did I just not read the whole comment?). Those examples are fine, and remnants of the older inverting system (first and then are different, though: they're adverbs of time/space, and such usually do come with inversion); but the group of verbs that allow inversion after a fronted prepositional phrase is rather small, and neither be, may, nor shall (from the sentences in the answer) are not part of it. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 03 '14 at 20:12
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: Does "In this place shall terror reign" (random example) sound ungrammatical to you? – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 04 '14 at 00:23
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    To me, yes. Less definitely so than with some other examples, but still ungrammatical. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 04 '14 at 00:44
  • @JanusBahsJacquet: Then we'll definitely have to agree to disagree!! – Lightness Races in Orbit Dec 04 '14 at 01:17
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The answer to the question hinges in the definition of the word "phrase". A phrase can be any conceptual expression of some kind of clause, whether grammatically correct or not:

A small group of words standing together as a conceptual unit, typically forming a component of a clause:

‘to improve standards’ is the key phrase here

is a phrase.

So, a more complete answer than this would tell you that "Than" can be used in phrases of a certain grammatical type ONLY, and not phrases of another grammatical type. So perhaps you should ask what kind of phrase cannot be started with the word "Than". That is a truly technical and interesting question for an advanced English teacher.

You may find that it can't be used in to start a "sentence" in it's strict sense because a sentence is:

"A set of words that is complete in itself, typically containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question, exclamation, or command, and consisting of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate clauses."

bandybabboon
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Only if the sentence is a partial one, and you are using ellipsis, as in dialogue. In formal writing, it's not proper.

Ornello
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    This answer was refuted six hours before it was posted. – Brian M. Scott Dec 02 '14 at 07:27
  • I beleive that this answer is true, because because the answer to the question hinges in the definition of the word "Phrase". A formal literary phrase i.e. from a written book cannot contain a word beginning with "than" and be a gramatically correct phrase. However, a quolloquial, gramatically incomplete dialogue can contain such "interjections" which arent Strictly speaking Phrases – bandybabboon Dec 03 '14 at 05:09
  • Sorry after reading the definition of the word Phrase, this answer does not agree with the oxford English dictionary's definition of the word Phrase. – bandybabboon Dec 03 '14 at 05:20